A woman is silhouetted against an enhanced photographic image at the entrance to CERN's control centre showing the 27 kilometre long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It was used to confirm the apparent existence of the Higgs Boson or Higgs particle. CERN (originally: Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, now the European Organization for Nuclear Research) was established by 12 Western European countries in 1954. In October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to CERN's Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for their theoretical work on the Higgs boson